Why I will vote yes on the resolution(s) expressing no confidence in the provost's leadership

The UNCG College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) and the UNCG Faculty will be voting on resolutions of no confidence in the provost soon

I support voting "no confidence" in the provost. Below I include some bullet points on why I will vote "yes" on the resolution. I did not write this out of malice for the provost or chancellor. UNCG is a special place- unlike any of the 8 institutions where I have worked. I love my job here.  I am really fearful that in leadership's attempt to try to position UNCG for the future, they are leading the campus into a death spiral because of decisions made in academic affairs. Academic affairs is the domain of the provost.

In contradiction to what I have heard several people say, I don't necessarily believe that the only response to a vote of no confidence is the resignation or removal of the provost. Confidence can be rebuilt, if a leader wants to.

There are not many ways for faculty to collectively share their concerns about past actions and future confidence in the provost. The Faculty Senate and CAS have passed less weighty resolutions expressing concerns,  I have seen no evidence that the provost (or chancellor) have reflected on these resolutions or want to improve relationships with faculty as a whole.  Even worse, the provost has seemed to ignore/dismiss the Faculty Senate's overwhelming votes, perhaps because she believes those votes don't represent the faculty as a whole, or are a result of "sour grapes".  A vote of no confidence now seems like the only way for faculty to express those concerns in a way that might be heard, reflected upon, and might lead to positive change. Both the chancellor and provost seem to view the current situation with faculty who are concerned about their leadership damaging UNCG as a "partisan" battle to be won or lost.  It does not have to be that. way and leadership should never subscribe to this false dichotomy. 

• The simple reason I will vote "yes" on the resolution expressing no confidence in the provost is because I have absolutely no confidence in her ability to lead as the chief academic officer. The lack of confidence is driven because most every action I have seen the provost take since she arrived is in contradiction to what I learned during my 25 years a senior administrator of how to effectively lead an institution and build excellence, which generally supports financial sustainability. I won't lay all of those out here. . I would be happy to provide more detail if you ask
• I think the APR process was simply terrible and alone justifies a vote of no confidence. This was an academic process owned by the provost. The failures of the process should be acknowledged. Issues that the faculty have with outcomes should not be deflected to deans  (at least the dean of CAS) who had little authority within the provost's management style. Additionally, the rubrics had metrics that don't make sense- e.g. such as using a first time, full time freshman cohort during Covid, and not including the 50% of new students who are transfer students, as the bases of retention and graduation data by department (and many more issues). And, if you read an earlier blog you can see that the rpk consultant declined to articulate what the importance was for each metric. Error prone data was and is being used. Dependent variables were treated as independent Thousands of hours of faculty time was wasted in committees, meetings and forums that appear to have had little to no impact on the outcomes and with nothing but faux transparency.  There has been no plan to ask all units who did not yet meet expectations to create a plan to improve, or to conduct a thorough academic program review, even if no action has been taken, while programs that scored well were eliminated, with no clear rationale, at least to me. There have been chameleon like rationales articulated for the APR that don't align with any of the outcomes. And, I found in my 10 years experience as a dean and provost that the ability to truly assess programs is nearly impossible without comparing to peer programs and with external review. The latter two were explicitly disallowed by the provost in the APR process.
• I found during my career, that high functioning organizations have clear alignment between authority and responsibility. High functioning universities, in my opinion, have deans that act like CEOs, inspire a vision, grow the vision through fundraising, incentivizing new or reimagined programs, and have the authority to allocate resources. And, those deans are held accountable for those results.  Lesser functioning universities remove authority of deans and chairs, moving that authority centrally, while still expecting deans to own the responsibility of central decisions.  Our current provost seems to have, in my opinion, has worked to centralize all significant academic authority from deans while still giving them all the responsibility for her decisions. This type of organization can not work for long, at least in my experience, which I am happy to share.
• It feels like (though has not been articulated) that the provost's vision, at least for part of the institution, is moving to a 4-year community college model. Although community colleges have less physical infrastructure to manage and support, higher faculty teaching loads, and lower faculty salaries, they have the most unstable budget models in higher education. Additional evidence in this regard is that the provost has proposed that there will be another portfolio review next academic year to focus on graduate programs. The rationale that was apparently stated was because the state funding model appropriates more funding for undergraduate credit hours than for graduate credit hours.  That is true.  But, I think the provost has fallen into the trap of assuming that since the funding model is based on the number of credit hours that we sell, that credit hours in a discipline are what students are buying. I disagree.  For students and parents, they are investing money in the university for a student's future.  Thus, UNCG has to have a value proposition for that investment based on quality. The reputation of the institution is critical, and that reputation is largely built on scholarly and faculty excellence, which is also built on having at least some very strong graduate programs, at least for relatively large public universities. The current path which seems to have more faculty members teaching 4-4 loads, reductions in research, and reductions in graduate programs, may allow the university to sell credit hours more efficiently. But, the reduction in the value proposition of university with a much higher student:faculty ratio (who wants to go to a university with a 40:1 student faculty ratio when they can go to another one with a 25:1 or 20:1 student faculty ratio for the same price?), faculty who do not have time to engage with students, and a reduced reputation, may very well end up causing larger reductions in enrollment, leading to more cuts, and then more reductions, and so on.  The provost has never communicated (at least in anything I read or heard) how she thinks it will be possible to reach financial sustainability simply by focusing on the efficiency of teaching credit hours, or even with realignment of programs through the APR.  Honestly, I have no idea how anyone can assume that enrollment will not decline because of the damage done to the reputation and quality of programs by the APR process. I hope I am wrong.
• The response of the provost to the criticisms, the votes of the CAS faculty, UCC, Gen Ed Council and the Faculty Senate seems to me to have been at best to ignore them and at worst to simply defend, deny, show no ability to reflect on the concerns, or to say that the large margins in which those resolutions passed were because of a small band of faculty..  Because of this approach, it is impossible for me to have confidence that the provost can change in a way that would inspire the academic side of the university to work smarter, empower deans, create a climate for risk taking and innovation necessary in facing the "headwinds" the chancellor keeps talking about, and rebuild trust and faculty morale. I think UNCG's hope for the future lies in these attributes of a provost. In my opinion, the chancellor has been too involved in the APR, which as solely an academic process should be owned by the provost. 
• I know some people don't wish to vote no confidence because they fear who might become the next provost. In my experience, accepting the devil you know is accepting living in hell.  Perhaps a new provost would create a worse hell, but accepting the devil you know is something that I have zero empirical evidence is an effective strategy. UNCG deserves leadership that can bring the campus together, make sound and transparent decisions, appreciate the work faculty do and our dedication to the distinctive students we serve, and who gives the campus confidence that they can steer the UNCG ship through the political headwinds and financial realities, allowing faculty to focus their energy on the teaching and research that matters most to us.
• On another note, there are values expressed by the provost such as transparency, shared governance and caring that don't seem to align with actions. I just want to point out that transparency is never determined by the sender of information, is not correlated with the number of engagements, and it is determined by the receiver. So, when 75% of the faculty senate suggest things weren't' transparent, and that shared governance processes were not followed, one would hope the response would not be defensive, but reflective. And, I think that caring is an action, not a value. And, it is an action that the senior administration at UNCG rarely shows when faculty, staff and students need it the most, such as those faculty who have dedicated their careers to UNCG and who have already been told their contracts will not be renewed and others who may soon lose their job. 
• In my opinion, the provost seems to have made a conscious decision to weaken the research enterprise, weakening the office of research, and to let excellent research faculty leave, even when the economics of them leaving doesn't work (e.g., being unwilling to offer a $20K raise for a faculty member recovering $250,000 in F&A costs annually, with likely growth for the foreseeable future). 
• The provost has demonstrated, at least to me, that she can be just outright mean. The best example to me is the termination of a former graduate dean which I feel was handled in an inhumane way. The mission of universities can be summed up by "building people up". The provost (and the chancellor and vcfa) seem to believe that one can manage by hurting and diminishing people, and still have an organization that supports the development of students, faculty and staff. I don't believe that is possible. I have seen what happens to a campus when administration loses its perspective of the purpose of universities as a positive force in developing students and ideas (I once worked with a president who was booed by students at graduation). I have also seen the work that has to be done, and the tremendous expense, to heal a campus when those administrators leave
• You can find other reasons for how I may vote in my previous blogs. My list is long with respect to how poorly I believe the provost has managed the campus, managed the deans, retained faculty, supported research and scholarship and micromanaged the Faculty Senate leadership. To me, she seems  unable to, or at least won't, articulate, a strategy that can create a compelling academic reason to attend UNCG or to inspire faculty. She also seems unwilling to foster innovation, entrepreneurism and careful risk taking with the budget (e.g., being unwilling to think of predictable sources of revenue like F&A recovery, and predictable sources of reduced expenditures like university-wide turnover of faculty and staff, or incentivizing units to develop programs that will bring in new students).
• For those that are thinking, how come I haven't brought this up before since the chancellor and provost often say "we want to hear from you.", I will say that I responded pretty much every time there was a chance for written input. My guess is most of those comments found their way to a circular file. I also asked whether the provost might be interested in having coffee with me to pick my brain. She, very politely, but very clearly, declined.

I often have contrarian opinions. So, I don't expect every reader will agree with me.  In the current climate at UNCG, people are afraid to talk about their opinions openly. I wrote this blog to maybe open the door for others to say or write what is on their minds . I would be very happy to hear (and truly listen and reflect on) your opinions if they are different than mine, and I would be happy to share mine in more detail

On a final note, I find it ironic that a recent narrative is that faculty members that support the provost fear retaliation from other faculty. I learned the hard way about the perception of the extensive power of the provost and deans. So, the faculty that most likely need protection from retaliation are those that have taken real risks to their careers speaking out, submitting resolutions, and talking openly on the Senate floor about their sense of the failure of leadership. Believe me, I fear retaliation just like most people feel right now who state their perspectives, apparently on both sides, from just stating my opinion here.

In that vein, I find it indefensible that the Faculty Senate Chair found it appropriate to read an anonymous letter into the Faculty Senate record in support of the provost and implying racial bias, and for the Secretary of the Senate (who reports to the Provost in her role as a provost fellow) to put more emphasis in the draft of the Senate minutes-on the anonymous letter than on the several faculty who emotionally and intelligently articulated their position in the open.  Many of the faculty that spoke about the consequences of the APR results were the MOST vulnerable faculty in the institution at that time.